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Making Strategies in Spatial Planning pp 161–183Cite as

When Strategy Meets Democracy: Exploring the Limits of the ‘Possible’ and the Value of the ‘Impossible’

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Part of the book series: Urban and Landscape Perspectives ((URBANLAND,volume 9))

Abstract

This chapter faces the diffuse perception of an increasing malaise in the ability to imagine radically different urban and regional developments which currently affects collaborative/relational strategic planning processes. Such inability is particularly visible in declining urban areas characterised by a profound socio-economic and environmental crisis.

The first part of the chapter discusses the meaning of imagination within the relational strategic planning approach and adopts a Deleuzean cartography to visit the complexity of the everyday urban life. The second part concerns the city of Taranto, its stories and suffering, its beauty and irreversible cancer and its plans and desires. This city’s everyday life is described either as a complex cartography of engaging, fighting, cooperating, ignoring trajectories of evolution and change or as a set of lines of thinking and acting each of them characterised by its own movement and inhabited by actants, forces and relations. In the third part the chapter argues that strategic planning can offer a comfort zone delimitated by the space of possibilities within which socio-economic and environmental crises can be anesthetised and treated as a set of problems and solutions more or less known. The chapter concludes by arguing that the difficulties experienced in imagining radically different urban futures in the field of strategic planning figure in its conceptualisation of the imagination as the construction of executable possibilities, which ignores the imagination of the ‘impossible’.

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Acknowledgements

I want to thank my brother Emilio for spending with me sleepless nights discussing doubts and fissures in my thought. He has the power to remind me of the difficulty and joy of doing research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Architecture and Town Planning, Polytechnic of Bari, 70125, Bari, Italy

    Valeria Monno

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  1. Valeria Monno
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Correspondence to Valeria Monno .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dipto. Conservazione dei Beni, Architettonici e Ambientali, Università di Napoli Federico II, Via Roma 402, Napoli, 80132, Italy

    Maria Cerreta

  2. Fac. Architettura, Dipto. Architettura e Pianificazione, Politecnico di Milano, Via Bonardi 3, Milano, 20133, Italy

    Grazia Concilio

  3. , Department of Architecture and Town Plan, Polytechnic of Bari, Via Orabona 4, Bari, 70125, Italy

    Valeria Monno

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Monno, V. (2010). When Strategy Meets Democracy: Exploring the Limits of the ‘Possible’ and the Value of the ‘Impossible’. In: Cerreta, M., Concilio, G., Monno, V. (eds) Making Strategies in Spatial Planning. Urban and Landscape Perspectives, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3106-8_10

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